What to know about the immigration protests in Los Angeles

Chicago Tribune

a day ago

As Los Angeles braced for more confrontations between law enforcement and demonstrators, the U.S. Northern Command on Monday said the Trump administration was deploying a battalion of 700 Marines to the city to protect federal property and personnel.
The Marines were set to join hundreds of members of the California National Guard who deployed to Los Angeles on Sunday. The National Guard troops were called in by President Donald Trump, against the wishes of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, after days of clashes over the weekend between the authorities and demonstrators protesting the Trump administration's crackdown on immigration.
California's Democratic leaders have condemned Trump's moves. Newsom said the order to deploy the National Guard was 'purposefully inflammatory' and called for it to be rescinded. On Monday afternoon, he said the order to send hundreds of Marines to California was 'a provocation, not just an escalation.'
State Attorney General Rob Bonta said California would file a lawsuit against the Trump administration over its move to take control of the state's National Guard and deploy troops to Los Angeles to protect immigration enforcement agents.
The protests have been largely peaceful but have flared up in pockets of downtown Los Angeles and in nearby suburbs, as well as in San Francisco.
How did the protests develop?
Protests broke out Friday when federal agents searched the city's garment district for workers whom they suspected of being immigrants in the country without legal permission, as part of the Trump administration's new focus on raiding workplaces. They were met with protesters, who chanted and threw eggs before being dispersed by law enforcement with pepper spray and nonlethal bullets.
Demonstrations continued Saturday, both downtown and in the mostly Latino and working-class suburb of Paramount, about 15 miles to the south. Law enforcement officers made arrests and in some cases used crowd-control munitions, tear gas and flash-bang grenades against the protesters.
Trump signed a memo Saturday ordering 2,000 National Guard members to deploy to Los Angeles to protect federal officers conducting immigration operations, despite the objections of Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.
On Sunday, nearly 300 members of the California National Guard took positions in the city. Demonstrations Sunday afternoon near a downtown detention center were largely peaceful, but some protesters fired fireworks at police officers under a bridge on the nearby U.S. 101 freeway. Several driverless Waymo cars were set on fire in downtown Los Angeles.
The protests were 'getting increasingly worse and more violent,' McDonnell said Sunday, blaming the violence on 'anarchists' and 'people who do this all the time,' not people protesting immigration raids.
More than 150 people have been arrested in Los Angeles since Friday, officials said. About 150 more were arrested in San Francisco, where demonstrators and police officers fought on a downtown street Sunday night.
Who calls in the National Guard?
The National Guard is the only branch of the military that can be deployed both by state governors and by the president. Governors almost always control deployment in their states.
The Guard operates similarly to the Army Reserve force. Most of its members do not serve full time. They generally hold civilian jobs and attend regular training sessions, and are called into active service only when needed. The Guard is most often called upon during extreme weather events like hurricanes, floods and wildfires.
Before Trump's move, the last time a president activated a state's National Guard troops for such a purpose without being asked to do so by the state's governor was in 1965, according to Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, an independent law and policy organization.
On that occasion, she said, President Lyndon B. Johnson used troops to protect Civil Rights demonstrators in Alabama.
What have officials said?
On Monday, Trump said the protesters in Los Angeles 'are insurrectionists,' appearing to adopt a rationale that could allow him to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act and use active-duty U.S. military personnel to deal with protests.
California's Democratic leaders have blasted Trump's moves, saying the order to deploy the National Guard was unnecessary and an inappropriate use of power, while urging protesters to remain peaceful.
In an interview with The New York Times on Monday, Newsom said the decision to send the Marines to Los Angeles was 'intended to sow more fear, more anger and to further divide.'
Appearing on CNN on Monday morning, Bass said that on 'a few streets downtown, it looks horrible,' but said that there was 'not citywide civil unrest.' She added that anyone who destroyed cars or engaged in violence would be prosecuted.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.